1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention described herein pertain to the field of computer systems. More particularly, but not by way of limitation, one or more embodiments of the invention provide a conditional text publication system and method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conditional text publication allows for the publication of text that varies based on data values associated with the text. There are no known conditional text publication systems that allow for the varying of text based on underlying data values associated with a publication. Known systems simply publish text that merely includes data values from a database, via reference embedding. In these systems, data values from a database are simply inserted into published text without using the values to determine the exact text to publish. For example, there are no known systems that apply clauses, functions, operators and selectors on a database to determine what text to include or exclude from a publication based on the data to be published. For instance, a table of products to be published in a product catalog is merely published with the values of the products. There is no known system that determines if there is a unique product in a product table that would indicate that text associated with the unique item should be included in a publication that includes the product table.
For the case of a product catalog, reference embedding functionality simply allows for the import of data values for a group of products into a table format. Generally, when publishing a product catalog, items that are similar may be considered a family of associated products that are published together in this manner. When items in a table for example have different characteristics, current solutions are incapable of adding or altering text based on these characteristics and hence generic table formatted data is published. The table so published may then fail to include information related to particular products and hence may result in improper purchasing and higher customer support requirements.
For example, when publishing a catalog having families of related parts, there are no known solutions that allow for conditional publication of text based on the characteristics of items in the family. If one member of a family of products such as pipe is plastic and the rest of the members of the family metal, known solutions simply publish text that is generic to the entire family without the ability to present text that notifies the reader of other items that the reader may wish to purchase. In this case a user would be well informed to purchase plastic pipe glue when purchasing the plastic pipe. Current systems are incapable of conditionally publishing text associated with a product having characteristics that set it apart from other members of the family.
Text based documents may be published to multiple media types, for example print and markup, e.g., HTML. Formatting a single document for multiple media types is time consuming and requires extensive maintenance to ensure proper formatting when text changes. For example, each published text associated with each document for each media type must be checked to verify that the text change produces valid formatting for each media type. There are no known systems that allow for conditional text publication that is then rendered in different media types. Publishing text for alternate media types using existing technology requires modifying the text to fit a required output format for a given media type. Current systems that perform this function are generally hardcoded and when a particular piece of text changes, all target media publications must be manually adjusted for each media output type. When adding a multiple media requirement to the text maintenance work flow, conditional text changes multiply the amount of work by the amount of supported media types.
Hence known systems generally provide stagnant and generic data due to the complexities of maintaining and customizing data for families having data with unique characteristics. For at least the limitations described above there is a need for a conditional text publication system.